Dutch village walk

In the early 20th century, Russian filmmaker and theorist Lev Kuleshov discovered that a single shot of an actor with an ambiguous expression on his face could convey a multitude of very distinct meanings in the mind of the viewer, depending on the nature of the shot immediately preceding it. In 1918 he conducted his famous experiment (below) using a single shot of the silent film actor Ivan Mozzhukhin’s face looking at something off-camera. Kuleshov spliced it in with a series of quite different images–a bowl of soup, a dead child, a scantily clad woman–and discovered that the audience would interpret Mozzhukhin’s emotion (hunger, pity, lust) depending on the juxtaposition.